The Queensland Supreme Court found on March 6 that the Moreton Bay Regional Council (MBRC) had violated people’s human rights when it displaced them from public land and disposed of their tents and property.
Justice Paul Smith found that “the applicant’s human rights were breached” through acts that included an “error of law”. He also found that “the time for compliance in the notices issued was not reasonable” and “the Court will hear further from the parties on the relief to be ordered”.
The MBRC had been forced to defend a legal challenge, mounted by Kallangur residents surviving homelessness, with the support of Basic Rights Queensland, which successfully secured an injunction against MBRC preventing it from acting on further eviction notices in August last year.
Beau Haywood, founder of non-for-profit Nourish Street, also participated in the court challenge.
The Human Rights Commission (HRC) and Queensland Attorney-General joined the case as third parties, with the former supporting the applicants’ position that their human rights were violated while Attorney-General Gim Del Villar rejected the notion that MBRC’s decisions were a human rights violation.
Smith’s judgement found that council officers had not exercised “discretion” over whether an offence had been committed and failed to refer the homeless people to the MBRC and Department of Housing.
He said council officers used pre-filled notices, which means they did not consider the individuals’ circumstances before serving them a move-on notice.
The court found that the council had removed and disposed of property, including the ashes of a couple’s deceased daughter, without consent. It also found that council had executed the removals within a “wholly unfair” time-frame and breached the applicant’s human rights by unlawfully issuing notices.
Further, the court found that council officers did not take the people’s human rights into consideration, while noting the officers’ identities were “largely unknown”.
The MBRC and council officers argue that the homeless people in question consented to begin moved on. The judge found much of this “consent” was coerced.
Homelessness researcher Cameron Parsell told the ABC on March 23 about MBRC’s practice of asking armed law enforcement officers to step in and the average person’s lack of their democratic rights and legal literacy.
“The police and council know that when they use their presence to advice them, the regular citizen doesn’t understand the full nature of the law.”
Records show that while some homeless people were given a few days’ temporary accommodation or placed on wait-lists for social housing, others were declined assistance because they did not have the required identification. No-one was provided with social housing.
The applicants argued that property with tens of thousands of dollars including tents, phones, generators, cooking equipment and irreplaceable sentimental items were destroyed.
The Supreme Court finding comes as Queensland councils use their powers to displace and dispossess unhoused people on public land. If people camping on public land in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and the Moreton Bay Region do not consent to moving on after being issued compliance notices they can be fined.
MBRC CEO Scott Waters did not apologise for the MBRC’s unlawful actions or human rights violations. Instead, he said “it does not change [the] City of Moreton Bay’s Camping on Public Land local laws” and “the Human Rights Act 2019 (QLD) is not a license to do what is otherwise unlawful”.
Notably, Smith did not rule against councils issuing further evictions.
Councils still have the right to issue move-on notices and fines, with the support of police. It remains to be seen how they will respond and what relief will be ordered for the MCRC victims.
Meanwhile, QShelter, the peak body for housing and homelessness, has asked the reactionary Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner to be a keynote speaker at its CEO leaders forum and lunch on June 24. Shamefully, the decision was announced two days after the Supreme Court found that that the MBRC’s actions were human rights violations.